# The Memory Police

- Author: Yoko Ogawa
- Translator: Stephen Snyder
- Original title (Japanese): 密やかな結晶
- First published: 1994
- Publisher: Vintage
- This edition: 2020
- ISBN: 9781101911815
- Shelf: Japanese Literature in Translation

## Card

On an island where things vanish one by one, along with people's memories of them, a novelist hides a man who can still remember.  
The calm, almost gentle voice makes each disappearance feel both ordinary and quietly terrible.  
For a night when the house is very quiet.  

## About this book

A young novelist lives on an island where objects such as birds, ribbons, and photographs are made to disappear, and the islanders forget them too. A feared force, the Memory Police, hunts those who keep remembering. When she learns her editor is in danger, she prepares a hidden room to shelter him. Told plainly, with passages from the novel she is writing, the book leaves a lingering sense of how much can be lost without anyone noticing.

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